digitaldust

I bought this book intrigued by the title and the concept. A game that is the totality of all human knowledge and uses all things from music to physics to literature. However I think that the translation lets it down somewhat. Rather than a game the process described in the book seems fairly rooted in the concept of music. The game itself is not played out between contestants but is rather a poetic juxtaposition of various threads of learning. The German Spielen means more like To Play and so the word spiel is more like a playing rather than Game.

So I was disappointed there. Also it was not a book that follows a contemporary narrative. At one point the narrator says that the book is not a hagiography but tells it from all sides. This is far from the truth, in all things the main character succeed and does superlatively. Any minor setbacks are cleared up within a few pages at most. Disappointing in the extreme when one is used to contemporary drama laden plots.

The Nietzschean leanings of Hesse are obvious. The district of Castalia with its elite schools and game college are just like a little country of Ubermen, supported, and in their eyes justly so, by the world around them. Able to concentrate purely on ever more esoteric analysis of all human learning. They don’t even do any further creation, no research, no experimentation, no theorizing, no new music, no new literature. It’s all very insular and self interested. At a couple of points it feels like it might be lampooning this or even trying to seriously show the delusion in this, but quickly the reader realizes that the author is quite committed to this. Maybe he wasn’t and it’s a great self contained novel written from the point of view of a committed Castalian, but from what I’ve heard of his other books it’s not too different in philosophy. He has a big mélange of eastern mysticism, Buddhism and Nietzschean lines of thought.

This would be an interesting book if there was a more normal narrative structure, some real drama and also an interesting actual game to set things to. A game is a wonderful literary method to introduce all sorts of tension and would be fun to write about.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about what I’ve read, mostly due to the fact that I’ve not read anything worth writing much about. I’ve also not been reading much what with moving and with the summer in full swing. But now that I’m in my new house and the rains have come again I’ve made a promise to myself to read through my large pile of “need to read” books. Not so much of a pile more of a box lying under my bed.

First up was Marshall McLuhan. He’s the godfather of soundbites and I’ve heard plenty of his terms and quotes before but not read anything all the way through. This book is an easy read and very much to the point. Nothing that new, but interesting to see exactly how much of his thought has become common media knowledge nowadays.

He’s also reintroduced me to Alfred North Whitehead, who I had till now only known as Bertrand Russell’s collaborator, but it seems that he has a whole other life outside of Principia Mathematica. Some interesting metaphysics called process philosophy… Also some interesting Whitehead quotes.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

The major advances in civilisation are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

I’m sure there will be more on Whitehead when I’ve read a bit more about him.

Wow!! This is great. The comparisons with Tolkein are not completely undeserved. This is a unique and different fantasy that doesn’t have an elf in sight.

His previous experience as a children’s author do show through and this would be a great book for kids to read. I know I would have loved reading it when I was in my early teens.
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I do think Greg Egan’s writing is amongst the most imaginative and challenging out there. But again I will have to say that I think that his short fiction is better than his novels. His stuff is strong on ideas and short on people, especially when in most of his work the characters aren’t human but computer simulated people of one type or another.

This book is the same. I never got into the characters; they were there purely to perceive the story through. Their relationships were weak and the attempt at dramatic opposition between the protagonist and his long lost love/hate/friend/enemy figure is just weak and petulant. I’ve never seen more immature 10,000 year olds. The main character has nothing to love or hate about him, and neither do anyone else. The future for Egan seems to be full of bland drones. Maybe will be.

His explanations of the physics are wonderful pseudo science but he does spend too long trying to explain it and gets a bit esoteric in both real physics and his new stuff. Hard to escape from when the book is about a new universe with a massively more complex physics, but he could have cut it bit shorted in places. I just read and didn’t try to understand much of it. Just let the sound and feel wash over me. I do think some readers want to understand everything but it is after all a fantasy and one must suspend belief and just read the story.

The end feels fairly predictable and most of what happened I saw chapters in advance. A few good ideas, but many not fully thought through, and when you’re always one step ahead of the characters who are super intelligent computer programs or centuries old humans the book becomes much less exciting.

I’m moved towards an abject sense of hopelessness by this collection of short stories. They focus around the human races tendancy towards self destruction. Aptly illustrating the pointlessness of the works of man with pointless but emotive stories played out by pointless and desolate characters. Most of them have no real conclusion, if they do then it is bleak and suggestively fatal.

Do not read in the presence of razor blades.

Welcome to Interzone

Amazing vision of the future from 1930. Although its a bit dated and plenty of his “next 100 years” is wrong there are hints of almost prophetic vision. His portrayal of various countries national flavour and reactions is almost spot on. His evaluation of the USA holds true today, and is especially poignant in light of the Iraq crisis right now. Not quite right with the timing, but he predicted the US winning over the Russian communists with guerrilla free-market activity. The actions of his Russian communists almost parallel the Chinese capitalist devolution today. (At his point in history the Chinese wasn’t communist, they were a republic.)

Other scientific and evolutionary predictions are wonderful. The first men depleting the oil reserves, tidal and geothermal power becoming important and also his own version of nuclear power (not right in modern scientific terms but staggeringly close to the physical reality of it). Along with nuclear power he also predicts all kinds of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In fact more often than not the races of man are wiped out by biological weapons… it’s either that or devolve into racial lethargy.

The one problem I feel his that his time scales are all too long. His tech levels plateau constantly. Maybe he didn’t feel the acceleration of tech in the 30s. His main influences seem to be Spengler, Hegel and Darwin (maybe some others similar). He is completely into evolution and the oscillatory nature of civilisation, with an eventual growth towards some ideal state. He needs his timescales to be significant enough to allow for evolution, he also wants to show that the history of man will be at least as long as the time since the earth was created. Making the 20th Cent a nice centre point and his time scales logarithmically increasing out from now.

Considering he never considered his work to be science fiction and had never read any (bar HG Wells) he has created/re-created a large number of scifi memes by himself. The victorian language and the occasional rambling and pointless digression can be forgiven for the pure and constant inventiveness that he had.

Amazon info

Electric is a contemporary noir novel set in an exciting Auckland, brought to the boil by a heady mix of lust, drugs and power cuts. Chad Taylor has a good way with words. You can see his crime background in the details and his fascination with noir style dialogue. While at times working his characters at times become too obscure for their own and the stories good. This may have been intended to convey the drug addled nature of the main character, but it becomes misleading and confusing,especially when you have to reread paragraphs to work out where they fit in the story.

Having said that it’s still a quick easy read that keeps the pace speeding along like it’s blasting off to Murawai with a tinnie in its hand.

I’ve been saving this book for six months now. I was given it as a present and wanted to wait till I had the time to just read it from cover to cover, with no interruptions, no delays, nothing getting in the way of my consuming it. I was right to do so, it was worth the wait, it is worth lavishing attention on.

The Scar is based in the same world - Bas-Lag - as his previous book Perdido Street Station, loosely following on from the events in that book, but not vital to read and nothing to do with the plot. It serves at most as an establishing macguffin.

Bas-Lag is an incredible fantasy world, well thought out, brilliantly imagined. It’s full of plenty of fantasy tropes, but there’s no pointy eared elves or leather clad barbarians in sight. He builds the world well by referring to a plethora of off stage places and things, relating them just enough to the story, leaving the reader guessing and wanting more, but not writing too much about them. No boring info dumps about irrelevancies, just vignettes of stories you want to find out more about.

His prose is very readable, moving easily from Lovecraftian to contemporary modes of description or speech. The thing that makes his work exciting for me is the names. Names of people and places fit, you can recognise New Crobuzon names from southern pirates, undead kingdoms have the right sound to them and invented races and creatures sound magical. It adds that feeling of veracity, in the manner of Tolkien, everything named just right and rolling off the tongue like they’ve been spoken for years.

Damn! Should have read this sooner. Would have helped out with my reputation research.

I like the cultural approach taken by Howard Rheingold. Futurology is difficult. I remember reading Negroponte’s book about his experiences with MIT media lab at the end of the eighties. He was all on about video recorders, video conferencing and VR. I think he was too caught up in the specific technologies. When you look at what VCRs and video conferencing are about, the social principles behind them are still relevant, personal recording and new means of communication. The big tech/social-evolution issues right now are about this. MP3s and Tivos are the next gen of VCRs, and it’s the personal recording aspects of this that are more important than the technology itself. The same with communication, video conferencing never took off because of the cost, but low cost communication is under going a revolution. Mobile phones and in particular SMS are taking off, both the basis for Rheingold’s book.

So what’s next… Personal recording crossed with communication. The 3R (Recommendation, Rating, Reputation) enabled P2P environment, as described still again in Smart Mobs. Prompts some interesting thoughts.